Road Blocks - New York Times

There was a really interesting article on those stranded away from New Orleans in the New York Times today.

Road to New Life After Katrina Is Closed to Many
By SHAILA DEWAN

CONVENT, La. — This was not how Cindy Cole pictured her life at 26: living in a mobile home park called Sugar Hill, wedged amid the refineries and cane fields of tiny St. James Parish, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket. Sustaining three small children on nothing but food stamps, with no playground, no security guards and nowhere to go.

No, Ms. Cole was supposed to be paying $275 a month for a two-bedroom house in the Lower Ninth Ward — next door to her mother, across the street from her aunt, with a child care network that extended the length and breadth of her large New Orleans family. With her house destroyed and no job or savings, however, her chances of recreating that old reality are slim.

For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.

“We in storage,” said Ann Picard, 49, cocking her arm toward the blind white cracker box of a house she shares with Ms. Cole, her niece, and Ms. Cole’s three children. “We just in storage.”

Source: New York Times (Full Article, No Registration Required)

Submitted by Nader Mohyuddin

Rebuilding NO One TPS Report at a Time - Reid Cater

Customers call into a service number and are asked to leave their information. The next day their call is returned by an employee who asks what service they require and takes their pertinent information. After fielding several dozen calls the employee gathers the various forms he has filled out makes copies of them and files the originals. Next he goes online to print maps of each customers location. He then attaches the maps along with other paper work to the duplicate of the customers form and forwards the packets to the field office. Finally he enters the customers information along with the reference number for their completed packet into an Excel spreadsheet for record keeping.

Since beginning my internship two weeks ago I have completed this process dozens of times. I would probably be doing very similar things if I was working for a company that was installing pools or selling paper. The big difference is that Operation Helping Hands is not selling anything to our "customers" instead we are gutting, painting and helping them to rebuild their homes for free. When I finish a packet and send it to our field office it does not lead to a small profit for a faceless corporation, it leads to a home owner receiving help that they desperately need. It brings them a step closer to returning home to New Orleans.

Sitting in an air conditioned office wearing business casual attire is much easier then gutting houses in the heat. It is also easier to become apathetic when your job mostly resembles Office Space more than Extreme Makeover Home Edition. However, when I field calls from homeowners and process their paperwork I still get to feel the satisfaction of helping people who are in need. Often times they have been trying for months to find someone anyone who might be able to help them. It feels great to be able to say to them that I can make sure that their house is gutted and that we will make sure that the city does not demolish it first. In my desk job directly helping people more than makes up for the occasional boredom of a long Excel spreadsheet.

Having an office job with such rewarding aims may have ruined me for more traditional office jobs. If so that might end up being the most meaningful result of this summer for my future.

Acclimation - Nader Mohyuddin

VS Naipaul writes in his 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival:

To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty.

Little is certain. After another harrowing finals week in Durham, I had before me several weeks of uncertainty. While I knew mine paled next to those of whom I’d be helping in New Orleans, it bothered me still. I knew summer would be fun—I knew that. But without an idea of where I’d be working, or of details of the meet-up in New Orleans, or of the personalities of those I’d be living with for two months, a lot seemed up in the air. I relaxed when I could, during my month of vegetation at home. Lots of food, video games, basketball, and fun summer outings. Couldn’t complain.

But the details worked themselves out. I’d eventually decided, on a last-second whim, to work with Providence Community Housing, a non-profit housing development group, working in property acquisitions. With my career interest in business, it seemed a good fit; with the tremendous benefits the work could result in (that is, a key step in building homes is to secure the property), it seemed a great fit.

And so June rolls around, my sister graduates high school, I say goodbye to a few friends, and I pack my belongings and head down to the bayou.

A week goes by.

And really, in a whirlwind. Providence ended up a spectacular fit, with consummate professionals in all areas of work, a short commute, and a comfortable working environment. A good friend of mine, Reid Cater, works with me at the office, though is often with another division. Mike Koler works there part-time as well, and may be involved in similar tasks as mine. With my own business card, a cubicle, and three bosses, I feel well acclimated already. I was never a coffee drinker: two days into work, and I can’t go without two cups a day. So it goes.

A brief description of what I do: I accumulate, manage, and analyze databases of potential target properties compiled from multiple sources (City of New Orleans, Housing Agencies, etc.) and examine their desirability for redevelopment. Another project on the horizon will entail assisting the development of a community-wide survey of every house in our target area (just north of Vieux Carre), to get a solid idea on who lives in each house, and what shape (physically and legally) the property is in. Meeting with residents and community “stakeholders” (those with vital interests in the community) for input in the redevelopment process is a key part of Providence’s vision. It is their community: Providence wants to develop it the way they want it. Paramount in this end is the philosophy of one-to-one housing: that is, building exactly as many units as is demolished, to make sure everyone who was displaced has a place to return.

So, I won’t have a lack of things to do. Sure, it’s a very “office” kind of job. (They are getting a new watercooler this week, in fact. Here comes the gossip.) But the cause is a great one, and they are taking the lead on all sorts of work, from community outreach, maintaining contact with refugees spread across 37 states, to lobbying Congress to ensure money allocation is done in the best interest of those most affected. Altogether, I don’t think I could’ve hoped for a better company, a better job for my interests and skills, and a better way to work this summer.

But summer isn’t all about work. Certainly not in New Orleans…to do so would be to belie the history and traditions we are working to restore. Fun is in no short quantity here. St. Charles Avenue is an architectural landmark, along with the rest of the Garden District. Just gorgeous. The food (non-dining hall, that is) has been good, but there’s certainly more to come. Delmonico anyone? The French Quarter, is, well, an icon. From the packed streets, to the legendary balconies, the fun is raging 24 hours a night. Old Bruno's on Maple is great, and Magazine Street has been a quieter, and personally more enjoyable destination, but fun spots seem to be all over the city.

There’s still a lot to do, no doubt. A bus tour of the Katrina destruction was certainly sobering. Virtual ghost towns that were bustling just two years ago. The water lines in particular are rather poignant. But, as the tour guide noted in her very slight Louisiana accent, there’s a lot already underway. For all the (deserved) anger at FEMA, The Road Home, and other inefficient bodies, the one force that even Katrina can not quell is that of human compassion. With thousands of volunteers in the area, work is getting done. Gutting houses, putting up drywall, painting houses in classically bright New Orleans color schemes—homes and businesses are slowly coming back to life. And with those come communities, and with communities comes a city. Long considered “the biggest little city in America,” New Orleans has had a variety of small, vibrant neighborhoods that had their own personal flavors. Working to restore these communities, which Providence is doing, is a key part of restoring New Orleans to what it was. And to help that cause is rewarding in any number of ways.

Arrival may be enigmatic, but life moves a little slower by the mighty Mississippi. With steamboats still chugging, with rum flowing like wine, and with muggy summer nights punctuated with the sweet swing of street jazz, it’s better just to take it easy.

The Water is Falling -Reid Cater

How can you not feel good when the water is falling?

There are a lot of reasons not to feel good in New Orleans, especially if you have lost your home and don't have the money or experience to even begin to rebuild. Yet, there I was at a meeting for homeowners who had lost everything and I was being asked how someone could not feel good. Looking outside the window of the trailer at a former church and school, now a warehouse and headquarters for Catholic Charities' Operation Helping Hands. I began to understand what that could mean. Progress may be painfully slow, but New Orleans is healing. People are slowly finding the money and help to turn their gutted houses back into homes. Working with Operation Helping Hands through DukeEngage this summer I hope that I will be able to watch the water continue to fall and maybe pump a little out myself.

Operation Helping Hands is a division of Catholic Charities that works with homeowners of all faiths to repair and rebuild their homes. We have programs that bring in volunteers from across the country to gut houses and do exterior work, i.e. painting, as well as a rebuilding program that guides homeowners through the process of completely renovating their gutted homes. (Since I am working with them as an intern this summer I guess that I can say "we" though I don't feel like I have earned that yet.)

An hour or so into my first day I found myself dialing the number of a Katrina survivor who had called our helpline, wondering what I would say. I had been given the job of calling people back and figuring out if they fit into one of our programs. After several calls and plenty of questions for my boss I began to get the hang of the calls. Some of the the people who called in needed help gutting their homes. Gutting is the process of tearing out all the drywall and destroyed personal items in a house and it is the first step towards rebuilding. However most of the callers had gutted their homes and were ready for the next and much more difficult step of putting the "guts" back into their houses so that they could finally move home.

Helping Hands provides gutting and painting free for those in need using volunteer labor and donations. Since most volunteers are not skilled enough to wire a home or put in the plumbing and dry wall the rebuilding program focuses on putting homeowners in contact with reputable contractors (working the phones I heard several stories about contractors who literally left holes in the walls) and acting as a mediator between the homeowner and contractor during the rebuilding process. Homeowners pay for the work themselves using funds from insurance or from "The Road Home" (a convoluted, federally-funded state-run, privately adminstrated-program that seems to be widely despised). Often there is a significant gap between the cost of rebuilding and a homeowner's avaliable funds. In these cases Helping Hands tries to fill the gap with donated materials and skilled volunteers. It is my job to explain all this to people who are desperate to move back into their homes as soon as possible. If they are interested I invite them to one of our meetings where they can hear more (from people who have been with helping hands much longer) and sign up if they like the program.

At the meeting I saw dozens of people packed into a small tralier on the grounds of St. Raymond's Church which was itself flooded in the storm. Many were elderly an/or disabled and all were fighting the frustration of being out of their homes for two years. And yet, after the meeting it was one of them who reminded me that no matter how bad things were or still are here on the Gulf, the waters are falling.